LITTLE ROCK — Unlike Barack Obama, who says he’d have to think twice about letting a son play football, and Roger Goodell, who says he’d absolutely allow it, Daryl Johnston actually has a son.
He plays football, too.
Coming to the conclusion that it’s all right for your kid to play football is a prospect more daunting than ever for a president, commissioner, banker or plumber. You don’t have to be a scientist to get it. The research on concussions and the accompanying horror tales are enough to scare off anyone with a standard case of misgivings.
But what if you played football for a living and loved it? What if it made you rich and famous? What if you’d had concussions, too? What if you remembered watching films the next day and wondered who that was in your uniform, getting up, walking back to the huddle, going through the motions?
What would you do?
Here’s what Johnston did: He took part in a University of Texas-Dallas Center for BrainHealth study that was released last month. Thirtyfour ex-players participated, with a mean age of 62. All reported at least one concussion in their careers. One had as many as 13.
The study, led by the center’s medical director, John Hart Jr., found 14 with various degrees of cognitive deficit, including two with dementia.
Twenty-four percent, or roughly twice the average in the general population, was diagnosed with depression.
Johnston had as much reason to worry as almost anyone. He’d had at least two concussions that he knew of from football, the last with the Dallas Cowboys in the early 1990s. He can’t recall who it was against, or exactly when, but the fullback fans called Moose remembers what it looked like on film.
“I took a knee to the side of my head when I was getting up after a play,” he said. “I didn’t go down, but I was out on my feet. You’re still functioning, still walking around. I didn’t make any mistakes.
“But I had absolutely no recollection of any of it.”
Despite his football history, as well as various head injuries typical of any athletic, rambunctious kid growing up, Johnston’s brain scan came back normal.
“Many former NFL players think that because they played football or had concussions, they are certain to face severe neurological consequences,” Hart said in a UTD release, “but that is not always the case.”
Football players have a funny way of reconciling their health with their job, which I’ve found in more than 30 years of occasional reporting on athletes and health issues. It’s not that they don’t get it. Many simply accept that they won’t live long, often basing resignation on bad information.
Just last spring, ABC News reported that the average lifespan of a retired player was 58, which was only off a decade or so. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health tracked 7,000 players in the mid-90s and found they were generally outliving their American male peers.
The problem with blindly accepting the bad data, Johnston says, is that players often won’t try to get help.
Officials at the BrainHealth center explained to Johnston that there’s hope even in cases of brain injury. Learning a musical instrument or another language can stimulate the brain’s frontal lobes.
Whatever the prognosis, it’s imperative that former players know where they stand.
Johnston didn’t have his first baseline test - a tool to measure normal brain function in order to help determine if a concussion has occurred - until after his football career was over.
His son had his first baseline at 11.
Johnston suggests that you do the same for your son. Do the research, too. Know the rules. Find out about coaches, teams and leagues.
“If your son wants to play football,” Johnston said, “understand that changes have made it safer.”
As a former football player, Johnston finds that a comforting notion. As a father of a football player, it’s something to hold on to.
Sports, Pages 21 on 02/20/2013